News Archive 2011

How is news being made today in the Middle East and North Africa – how is it being reported – how are the two acts really only one? Day-to-day, reading the Muftah Org conversation on the Global Conversation media portal at Brown provides one roadmap. Muftah Org co-founder Maryam Jamshidi '02 is just one of the Brown students and young alums charting the revolutions. Read how.

The Sport and Development Project, a new collaboration between Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies and Swearer Center for Public Service, aims to advance policy and practice in this growing field. Emblematic of its work is an event planned for Monday, March 7, featuring Kirk Friedrich, co-founder of Grassroot Soccer.

Former UN Ambassador and Brown Professor at Large Richard Holbrooke ’62 will be remembered in a ceremony led by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Thursday, 2/17, at 3:55pm. The secretary-general's remarks will be part of an event, attended by Brown President Ruth Simmons, called “A Life Remembered.” It will be webcast live here and thereafter available online.

Top Berlin newspapers Die Tageszeitung and Zeit Online were among the local media covering a recent screening at Kino Babylon of Human Terrain, a documentary produced by Institute Professor James Der Derian. The film was praised in Die Tageszeitung's review for its commitment to plumbing the complexity of the US military's strategy of cultural awareness to win over the hearts and minds of the Iraqi and Afghan people.

The International Relations and Development Studies programs based at the Watson Institute have been restructured “to make these concentrations more streamlined, integrated, and better-suited to actual student interests,” according to Professor Mark Blyth, director of both programs.

How are complex global networks, flows, and governance eclipsing state-centric models of the world? What ethical relationships, repercussions, and responsibilities are involved in the study, representation, and practice of world politics? What are the best practices and most effective tools for influencing experts and engaging the public on critical global issues? These are the questions being addressed by the Global Engagement through Innovative Media Project at the Watson Institute, which has been recast with a third major grant from the Carnegie Corp. of New York and cast in a new light on a redesigned Global Media Project website. "With this renewal we intend to take a big next step: to analyze, judge, and produce global media that can help create the world we want, rather than reproduce the world we fear," says Professor James Der Derian, who is leading the initiative.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Brazil’s international image was transformed from “a land of carnaval and tropical delights to a land of torture,” according to James Green, professor of Latin American history at Brown University. Green recently spoke at Watson on the systematic human rights abuses that occurred during Brazil’s military regime, and also analyzed the legacy of the transnational campaign against torture that erupted in response.

Last month in Ethiopia, Watson Fellow Geri Augusto gave a talk recommending two important steps be taken by scholars and reflective practitioners grappling with the relationship between the sciences and the humanities in an intensely globalizing world. “The first is to construct comparative local histories of science, to think about how to do new globally-oriented histories of science, and to attend more carefully to how the sciences have shaped our understandings of what it means to be human. The second is to contemplate more deeply how the arts may confront us with perceptual knowledge, at once both scientific and creative, symbolic and realist, cultural and political,” Augusto said, in a lecture titled “The Sciences and the Humanities in Conversation: Constructing Coeval Histories of Science in Africa and Brazil.”

"After Mubarak: A New Middle East?," a new installment of the Choices Program's online Teaching with the News offering, aims to help secondary school students learn the causes and implications of recent events in Egypt.

“Much like the Vatican in Rome, the state of Tahrir has taken possession of a square and has established itself regardless of what the (illegitimate) government of the rest of the country thinks about that.” So begins today’s blog post from Egypt by Mariya Petkova ’09, a Brown alum with a degree in international relations. On her blog, “A Bulgarian in Egypt,” she has been posting images and descriptions of her experiences at Tahrir Square since January 25, including her arrest, and providing general observations on the political situation in Egypt.

With change sweeping through Egypt, Tunisia, and on perhaps to other authoritarian regimes, “There are many lessons that are to be taken from this transformative experience,” Institute Visiting Fellow Nukhet A. Sandal writes in an op-ed in today’s Providence Journal. “The most important is that we should reconsider the amount of money that is spent on military and individual leaders rather than on people.”

A Brown faculty panel was organized at the Watson Institute on January 31 to offer perspectives on groundbreaking events in Egypt and Tunisia. The political developments that are continuing to unfold “promise to change not only the contours of rule in Tunisia and Egypt, but the quality of international relations in the region and across the world,” said Institute Director Michael Kennedy, in introducing the discussion.

At 4pm on Thursday (2/10/11), William D. Hartung will discuss his new book, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, in the inaugural event of a year-long lecture and film series commemorating the 50th anniversary of President Dwight Eisenhower's Farewell Speech. The series is presented by the Watson Institute's new Eisenhower Research Project and its Global Media Project. As he left office 50 years ago, Eisenhower argued that "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." He warned that "only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry" could protect the nation against the threats to democracy he thought those special interests posed.

How can Egypt enter into a post-authoritarian era? Institute Director Michael D. Kennedy and Cogut Center Fellow Shiva Balaghi cite a model from Poland's political transition in 1989 in an essay in Jadaliyya, an online magazine produced by the Arab Studies Institute, a network of writers associated with the Arab Studies Journal. In 1989, "the Polish government organized a series of roundtable discussions with the Solidarity Movement," Kennedy and Balaghi write. "The street protests moved into roundtable negotiations. The Polish Round Table made enemies into collaborators and showed the way towards radical but non-violent change."

A Brown faculty roundtable was organized at the Watson Institute on Monday to provide some basic information and offer thoughts on the implications of recent events in Tunisia and Egypt even as they unfold. "Middle East Update: Perspectives on Tunisia and Egypt from Brown Faculty" featured Melani Cammett (Politics), Shiva Balaghi (History), Ian Straughn (Islamic Archaeology), and Laurel Bestock (Egyptology). A report on the event was published this morning in the Providence Journal. Balaghi later spoke with Institute-based Radio Open Source host Christopher Lydon to expand on the situation.

From the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting this week in Davos, Switzerland, to popular protests across Egypt, inequality is increasingly the watchword for global leaders and local activists alike. In this time of growing emphasis, the Watson Institute’s five-year-old strategic focus on inequality represents the vanguard of academic research and training, producing new analysis and next-generation leadership to address a pressing problem.

A focus on non-military tactics is key for curbing the Taliban and Al Qaeda threat, according to Richard Barrett, the United Nations Coordinator of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Implementation Monitoring Team (also known as the Al-Qaeda/Taliban Monitoring Team).